Suppose we met a race of creatures—fairly clearly non-rational animals—that was very different from us: on Mars, say. And the question arises: are these creatures sexed? and if so, can we distinguish male and female? We need to think now how we would go about finding out these answers. We would not do it by investigating their psyches, nor even merely by just looking at (or cutting up) individuals. We would try to find out how they reproduced and what was the role of the different organs of the different individuals involved in reproduction. Thus, sex is a biological and teleological notion. Anything else which is called sexual is so called ultimately because it has some relation to this process, to these organs.
If we observe that the members of a species reproduce asexually, then we rightly conclude that neither male nor female exist in that species. But if we observe that two are required for reproduction to occur, we rightly conclude that the species reproduces sexually by the union of the two. We name these two types differently—as male and female—based upon the roles they play in reproduction. Such is why
Aquinas held to a binary account of sex: “The distinction of the sexes is ordained in animals to the generation which occurs through coitus.” If human beings had no ordering to reproduction, or no sexual reproduction occurred, not only would one have no concept of gender, there would be no biological sex in human beings.
There, thus, can only be two biological sexes for human beings. In syllogistic form, what I am arguing is this:
- Biological sex is defined in relation to the roles played in sexual reproduction.
- Sexual reproduction involves only two, namely, male and female.
- Thus, biological sex is only two, namely, male or female.
Defects occur in nature, but defects imply a norm from which they deflect. A castrated man is still a male; a female with a mastectomy is still a female. The fact that one is born with ambiguous genitalia does not do away with one’s true sex. That it is hard to identify someone as male or female does not mean one is neither. Identical twins are hard to distinguish, but they are still distinct persons. Epistemological problems need not entail ontological ones.
Consider the case of plants that reproduce sexually. When we discover a plant missing parts of its sexual organs, we do not thereby conclude that we have discovered a third sex. Rather biologists rightly concur that what you have found is a defective plant. Likewise, in human beings, when one has an extra chromosome, or defective genitalia, you have just that: a sexual defect at the physical level. Such people often are wonderful, loving, and morally upright persons, but physically something has gone wrong.
Hermaphrodites are individuals with both pairs of sex organs. While in very rare cases some human beings have both pairs of genitalia, in no case whatsoever has it ever been observed that both pairs are fully functioning. True human hermaphrodites with both male and female sexual organs that fully function don’t exist. Such is why
no cases of self-fertilization have ever been recorded in human beings.
Even if we did discover an individual human being with both pairs of fully functioning sex organs, such a case would not disprove the binary distinction. What you would have is someone who is both male and female; one who is able to act either as male or female depending upon the other sex with which that individual desired to reproduce. Hermaphroditism, rather than disproving the traditional binary distinction, actually reinforces it. We would not even know hermaphrodites existed, let alone be able to speak of them, unless we knew of the male-female binary.
Differentiating Potencies
How we fundamentally distinguish male and female then is based upon the two biological roles in reproduction. A human individual that has the basic capacity to reproduce with the female is biologically and truly a male. A human individual that has the basic capacity to reproduce with a male is biologically and truly a female. Male and female are defined in reference to each other, which is why they are correlative terms.
www.psychologytoday.com
